The Ones in the Arena: Reality Cards

Published in

Code4rena

4 min readAug 18, 2021

“We want Reality Cards to become the go-to platform for artists to drop art that has anything to do with real-world events.” — Andrew Stanger, Reality Cards

Reality Cards is the world’s first NFT-based prediction market. Instead of betting on an outcome, Reality Cards allows users to own it along with its associated non-fungible-token (NFT).

We chatted with Andrew Stanger, Reality Cards’ co-founder & CEO, about the company’s vision for the future, security in the DeFi ecosystem, and his favorite sci-fi reads.

What are you building, and what sets it apart from similar offerings in the space?

We’re building the world’s first “outcome ownership” market: a prediction market built around NFTs from day one. The way bets are made, winnings distributed, and liquidity incentivized are all entirely unique and unlike any other project in or out of the space.

What’s your vision for your project? What are you building towards in the longer view?

To become the largest prediction market on Ethereum and the dominant NFT platform for any NFT art representing real-world events! We want Reality Cards to become the go-to platform for artists to drop art that has anything to do with real-world events.

What’s the most innovative idea in your protocol?

We’ve modified Harberger Taxes to create a unique outcome ownership mechanic. Each outcome of an event (for example, Chelsea F.C., in a match vs Liverpool) is a single NFT and can be owned by a single person at a time — whoever is willing to pay the highest price.

“…[A]n extended period of beta release needs to become the norm, where you restrict users and/or total value locked, and gradually increase this over time.”

It takes courage to undergo a public audit by a swarm of anonymous security researchers. It also says a lot about how much you prioritize security. What advice would you give to those on the fence?

Not only is a Code4rena contest effectively on par with the top-tier auditor in terms of issues identified, but it also brings results in a fraction of the time — only a single week. Also, unlike “normal” auditing firms, it allows your community the chance to get involved!

Security has become an increasingly vital topic in DeFi. How do you think the ecosystem needs to evolve in order to rise to the challenge?

There needs to be an acknowledgment that no audit, or series of audits, will find everything.

Thus, an extended period of beta release needs to become the norm, where you restrict users and/or total value locked, and gradually increase this over time.

We have identified multiple issues only as a result of our beta release (which began four months ago), that audits missed.

“More than anything else, [I’m excited about] DeFi’s ability to experiment with mechanisms that may have been around for a long time, but for whatever reason, have never been tried in the legacy financial world.”

What gets you most excited about DeFi?

More than anything else, DeFi’s ability to experiment with mechanisms that may have been around for a long time, but for whatever reason, have never been tried in the legacy financial world. Two examples that spring to mind are Harberger Taxes (of which Reality Cards is one example — two others are WildCards and “This Artwork Is Always On Sale”) and novel public goods funding approaches, such as retrospective public goods funding.

I wish more DeFi projects would follow MakerDAO’s (among others!) lead and wind up their operations and become fully decentralised DAOs :)

What DeFi project name do you wish you’d thought of first?

Yearn!

What do you geek out about, beyond DeFi?

Sci-fi! I always have at least one book on the go. My favourite is (of course!) “The Three Body Problem” series by Cixin Liu. I also can’t forget “The Hope Runners of Gridlock” by Simon de la Rouviere, an Ethereum OG whose project ThisArtWorkIsAlwaysOnSale was forked to create the first version of Reality Cards.

Learn more about Reality Cards:

Reality Cards’ $30,000 USDC (+ $30,000 in tokens) security audit micro contest kicks off August 19, 2021, and runs for one week. Details at code4rena.com.

The Ones in the Arena spotlights emerging and established DeFi projects and their founders, with an eye to celebrating and learning from them. The series’ name is inspired in part by Teddy Roosevelt’s famous quote, which has a central place in Code4rena’s philosophy.